In early 2013, Fu Ping published her autobiography Bend, Not Break, coauthored with Meimei Fox. The book, along with her media interviews, has been found to contain many exaggerations, distortions, and fabrications. Fu Ping has responded by claiming to be a victim of a "smear campaign" of ulterior motives.

This blog documents the facts, questions, and falsehoods behind her book and words.

Saturday, April 27, 2013

Broken Fact: Fu Ping's Passport Timeline

The Original Story:
In Bend, Not Break, Fu Ping told a very convoluted story of how she managed to obtain a passport to travel abroad (which we will debunk later). On Pages 255-260, she had a rough timeline for the process:

Late last night, Fu’s publicist emailed me that they “confirmed that Ping started school in 1978 and left school in the fall of 1982 after being held by the government. She arrived in the U.S. on January 14, 1984.” So she was at home for over year before the police asked her to leave China? “The government asked Ping to leave a couple of weeks after her release,” the publicist wrote me. “However, getting a passport was very difficult, if not impossible, at that time. Even though Ping was asked to leave China, she had to wait for an official passport to be issued.”

The Debunking:

Getting a passport to leave China could indeed be very difficult in the early 1980s -- for ordinary citizens. One would presume that, if the government had decided to deport someone, all would be arranged.

The timeline in her book itself is a little fuzzy, of course. But it is reasonable to deduct that all the events happened within months of "fall of 1982" and that she spent weeks if not months obtaining the passport. Yet then she waited till the January of 1984 to actually leave the country. What a leisure way of getting "deported" into exile!

The alternative "two weeks" timeline would be a lot more consistent with the "deportation" claim. (Although, in practice, Chinese government typically only handed out the passport at the airport just as the deportee was escorted onto an airplane, after they started the practice in the mid-1990s.) Alas, it did not fit her timeline.